Very few people here seem to understand the basic concepts on which patent law is founded.
I have several patents to my name. Because of this, I know precisely how easy it is to formulate a set of relatively obvious concepts to look like patentable "method". Very few of these patents can really withstand legal scrutiny, but the cost of doing so is itself a bludgeon.
What makes this claim so disgusting, as I was attempting to point out in my post, is that Tivo has framed its objections to EchoStar's device so generally that they would apply to virtually any device that implemented standard PVR technology using commodity hardware, regardless of the specific methods used. By pointing out that Tivo has patented the "idea", I meant to imply that they are vastly overreaching what they should legally be allowed to patent-- specific, original methods.
Incidentally, I also have some experience with Tivo as a corporation, as my employer partnered with them several years ago. They are not hesitant about threatening legal action based on dubious ground, because they know that the threat of legal action is the only real weapon they have. Understandable for a small company, but certainly not something I approve of.
1) Reading and writing TV to the disk at the same time.
2) Reading and writing the same program to the disk at the same time.
3) Using a special file-system designed to allow "rewind, fast-forward and pause".
The first claim is rendered questionable by the mere fact that Tivo was able to purchase an off-the-shelf MPEG chip that encoded and decoded simultaneously. Though I can think of many uses for such a chip, at least one of those obvious uses is the simultaneous recording and playback of television. Note, I'm biased by the fact that I actually saw computers doing this in research labs long before Tivo the company existed or filed this patent.
The second is just nonsensical. So Tivo implemented a system that could record and play back at the same time, and used it to implement a digital version of a tape-loop. Not a new idea.
The third is trash. "Trick play" is a euphemism for "doing what every other MPEG-based video format does".
There are people who believe you can take a bunch of pre-existing components, bang them together for a use they were clearly designed for (recording TV), and this somehow "earns" you a patent. But it's nonsense. All Tivo did is take other people's off-the-shelf technologies and come up with a neat use for it. That's not patent-worthy, because the device itself is not terribly original.
But, really, bank records? Its not like its the usual dirty laundry like how much porn you have on your computer... unless your doing something illegal, what reason would you have to hide it? (I honestly am inquiring... I'm sure/.ers can help me out here...)
It's not just bank records! One of the other neat tricks in this bill is that the definition of "financial institution" has been rewritten to something like "any institution that handles large amounts of money." So this could in theory apply to any institution or business with which you do business with-- supermarkets, videostores, paypal, etc. With no judicial oversight or warrants.
That's supposed to be "the off-the-shelf under $10 MPEG chip they chose to use" was designed to simultaneously record and play back. I'm sure the manufacturers of that component (IBM?) never considered using it to record and playback from fixed storage simultaneously.
Yeah, and those lame ass Wright brothers patented an airplane. I mean they just used a bunch of commodity materials (wood, metal, canvas), the brilliant inventions of chain drive, internal combustion motors, and, get this... a rail.
Hardly a valid comparison. MPEG2 was specifically designed for the purpose of recording interlaced television; this was long before Tivo existed. When this codec was being devised, the developers anticipated that it might be used to record files to some sort of fixed digital storage-- thus, they implemented block formats that make it possible to pause and skip forward and backwards (you see this in DVDs and other media that pre-exist Tivo.) I even saw a number of hard-disk-based recorders implemented in research laboratories prior to Tivo's commoditization of same.
So the question now becomes: what is Tivo's "original" claim? The ability to record TV? No, that's what MPEG was designed for. The file system? Perhaps their implementation is original, but the concept of such a filesystem is nothing new-- it was anticipated in the MPEG2 design. The ability to record and play back a show at the same time? Well, here's a hint: The off-the-shelf to use in the original Tivo provided for simultaneous encoding and decoding. Now think about that; if the ability to record and play back simultaneously was so original, why would this sort of commodity hardware exist? It was specifically designed to do what Tivo claims is "original".
I don't dispute that the original Tivo did something that nobody else had done in the past. I'm only arguing that it was an incremental development, more of commoditizing pre-existing hardware devices and providing a neat interface. A more apt analogy would be if the Wright brothers had simply bought all the parts for their airplane kit off the shelf-- wings, aelerons, rudder, engine, all very coincidentally designed to be assembled together into an aerborne vehicle. Would we consider their flyer an original invention, just because they marketed it first?
In order for a claim to be rejected as being obvious the examiner must be able to point to specific material (with a provable date prior to the effective filing date of the patent application, July 30, 1998 in this case) which gives motivation or teachings that show how to alter the state of the art at that time
The use of MPEG2 should have indicated this invention was obvious. MPEG2 is a video codec that was specifically designed for the purpose of recording television; it includes block formats that make rewind, fast-forward, and (obviously) pause possible. There have been many previous implementations of MPEG recorders that use disk-based playback.
In this case, Tivo simply used the MPEG protocol for one of the uses it was designed for (they even used off-the-shelf video encoding chips.) The "innovation" here appears to be the ability to read and write at the same time. I suppose we'll have to wait until this reaches court to see if that's enough of an innovation to support a patent.
This does not mean that they'll be going after every DVR producer, only those who copied TiVo without adding any thought of their own.
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television using a) a bunch of video codecs they didn't invent, b) a bunch of commodity hardware they didn't invent, and c) the brilliant invention of rewind, fast-forward and get this... pause.
There are many original and non-obvious aspects to the Tivo design. The ability to record television, and (!!!) play it back at the same time, do not count. Give Tivo this one, within five years they'll be claiming patent infringement against anyone who records TV onto a hard-disk.
Incidentally, I remember back when Tivo obtained this patent. A bunch of Slashdot commenters-- with a "RTF(Patent)" attitude similar to yours-- made no effort to conceal their contempt for those of us who thought the patent might affect similar (but non-identical) implementations. IIRC, they made a big deal over the precise details in the claims, and how you would have to infringe upon all of those things to merit a lawsuit. Looks like things aren't quite so rosy.
As a digital music creator (who up until now has used a Windows-based PC and Acid Pro) I cannot tell you how excited I was by the demo John Mayer and Steve Jobs gave of GarageBand. From the looks of it (and I know that looks can be deceiving) you can record instruments straight into the computer without a digital interface... and it sounds amazing...I've tried this in the past (recording through the audio-in port) on my PC and have never gotten good results.
I'm not sure what the difference is going to be here. If your computer has a bad A/D converter and electronics (and most do, really), then no piece of software is going to make this better. If Macs have sufficiently high quality A/D conversion for this purpose, then you should be able to use any recording software, and I believe there's plenty of it.
Question about the firewall: The "exceptions" dialog indicates that the checked programs "will be allowed to receive connections from other computers." What if I simply want to prevent a program from making outbound connections, the way I can with ZoneAlarm?
China and India have massive reserves of potential high-tech workers, as long as they're intelligent enough to develop that resource. And it will take decades for the cost of living in those countries to reach the US cost.
Everything you say may be true, but I imagine it will be many years (decades) before we achieve equilibrium. Somehow your argument doesn't appeal to me very much, and it probably won't make a difference for you and I.
A few years ago we had people losing jobs in the manufacturing industry and all I heard from IT professionals was, "oh, why don't they up skill like us"
Yes, it was part selfishness. It was also part optimism. The general story used to sell these sorts of policie is the old: "some jobs will be lost, but in the long run we'll all gain-- all you have to do is retrain for a more cutting edge area."
It was easy enough to believe this was true when manufacturing jobs were going overseas. It was a terrible thing for the peope losing their job, but we sincerely believed that new opportunities would open up for those with a forward-thinking attitude, because we were Americans and that's the natural order of the world. You'll see many Slashdot posters taking that line even today-- comparing the current loss of jobs to the industrial revolution, etc., admonishing us all not to worry, we just have to wait for all the great new even-higher-level jobs that are due to us now that we've offshored those pesky coding duties to foreigners.
Problem is, it's increasingly difficult to see where these new opportunities are going to open up. In the past we had the advantage of a) having more natural resources (coal/steel/etc), and b) being one of the most educated countries in the world. But in a global economy, natural resources don't matter, and we're fast losing our advantage in education, now that India and China are producing thousands of brilliant students (with enough highly-educated people that GE can open a pure research lab over there). Note that India and China are smart enough to adopt national policy to educate their people, while America is allowing its educational system to go to the wolves.
So when this new opportunity comes along-- be it nanotech, biotech, whatever is next-- what insures that Americans won't lose it to foreigners? Unless it's something that by nature can only be done by US workers (and what would that be??), we're screwed. So I think the reason people are panicking now has something to do with the realization that there is nowhere to go from here-- that we've finally been pushed into the ceiling of our own capabilities, and the magical "retrain and retool" approach pro-globalization folks have advocated is not going to carry us when foreign workers can do the same and cost 1/50th as much to feed and house.
I currently do all of my banking through a University Credit Union. Prior to that, I used a Credit Union at the company where I worked. I've found precious little benefit to using either one; though Credit Unions tend not to charge monthly account fees, this doesn't represent the majority of my charges. Most of my charges come from the off-network ATM withdrawals I'm obliged to engage in because the Credit Unions have so few conveniently located machines.
In fact, because of this problem, I've determined that it may actually be cheaper to pay the $5/month or whatever a commercial bank wants. If you make more than three withdrawals in a month from a non-Credit-Union ATM, you're going to exceed that amount anyway. A larger bank will tend to have enough machines spread all over the country that the fee pays for itself.
I don't know why people are so pissed off about ATM fees. What, do you think the ATM fairy just drops them off all over the place for free? The machine costs money. The network costs money.
ATM machines are certainly not free, but they are a damned sight less expensive than the human-operated branches that banks used to provide for their customers (at no charge). In fact, cost-cutting is one of the reasons banks have consistently offered when replacing branches with ATMs. What any consumer with a brain should notice is that over the past decade or two, banks have continuously reduced their operating costs thanks to ATMs, and yet the amount of money customers tend to shell out for banking services has not decreased-- it has consistently risen. ATM fees are a big part of that.
The existence of ATM fees is due to the lack of reciprocal agreements among different banks. If bank A has thousands of machines, and wishes to provide better service for its customers, it stands to reason that it would try to enter into an agreement with another large bank B, in order to guarantee that neither banks' customers have to pay fees at ATMs belonging to either bank.
Unfortunately, experience has indicated that banks don't feel any desire to do this. In the real world, it is far more profitable for large banks to collude against their own customers through inaction-- by not creating reciprocal agreements, and collecting vast amounts of additional money through fees. This pads their bottom lines, and hey, what are customers going to do about it? There are only a few banks large enough to make such collaboration practical, and they don't seem too concerned about how much customers are paying (fees continue to rise, way ahead of inflation, despite the fact that the tech is getting cheaper.)
A similar situation exists in the world of wireless communications, where international phone companies ruthlessly assess other companies' customers absurd international roaming fees, even when the caller is only a few hundred miles from his home country. The income these corporations derive from fleecing their customers is far greater than what they would make if they chose to collaborate; since only a few companies are large enough to make this sort of agreement, and those companies make too much money off of the current arrangement, customers have nowhere to go.
From the examples given in the FraudFactor article, both sides seem guilty of gerrymandering whenever possible.
Not quite "whenever possible". At very least, redistricting has been historically confined to census cycles, by a sort of gentleman's agreement between the parties. The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently.
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
That's weird. I've been with Sprint for 4 years now and I've always had nights start at 7pm.
You might not. My wife, a Sprint customer of several years, thought her nighttime minutes still began at 7pm, only to notice a $42 charge on her Sprint bill for a 1hr call beginning at 8:50pm.
Apparently they moved "night" back to 9pm without informing her. The contract allows this kind of change, and it's one of the reasons I dislike Sprint so much right now. What makes it worse is that Sprint is now advertising "nights starting at 7pm" as though it's some luxurious new feature-- when in fact they're only moving back to a service level many customers already thought they had.
Incidentally, Sprint also charges any call that begins even one minute before "nighttime" as though the whole call took place during the day.
In the American system, it's possible to be found guilty by no less than two different courts before some third set of judges decides to acquit you. (...) You're admitting that most of the legal decisions in your country are being made by judges who are periodically (nay, regularly) in error.
Absolutely, and that's the basis for much of the English legal system. We recognize that the courts are often wrong, and we choose to place our burden of protection on the individual-- in an attempt to insure that innocent people aren't wrongly convicted. It could be argued that it makes more sense to protect society-- as Norway does-- perhaps locking a few innocent people up in order to keep dangerous criminals off the street.
That's neither here nor there. My beef is not so much with your legal system, but rather with the naive and demonstrably false argument you chose to defend it. Specifically, your claim that the Norwegian appeals system can be justified by its attempt to provide a "better", "more competent" decision. Hell, you even went so far as to claim that the Norwegian system was more accurate than the English system. Therefore, am I wrong to point out that the judges in your "accurate" system often disagree with one another?
In your post above, you claim that the goal of your appeals system is to decide a case with the highest level of competence possible-- I disagree. If competence were the only reason different courts disagreed, the answer would be simple: get rid of the incompetent judges who disagreed with their more competent counterparts. In reality, the reason different courts disagree often has nothing to do with competence, it has to do with subjective decisions made by judges. There's absolutely no guarantee that a higher court will be more competent, though it sure does make us feel better to imagine that's the case.
By casting your appeals system as a search for competence (and nothing more), you exhibit an extremely naive and demonstrably false understanding of the judicial system. In many cases, your system simply allows one set of judges to impose their prejudices on any defendant in the country. The real difference between our systems is that the English system distributes part of the decision-making process, insuring that no one court has absolute power in all respects, or can ever abuse its power to imprison people.
Now ask yourself this: If you were checking if a product was inside a specification, would you use one fairly accurate measurement, or many less accurate ones and reject it if one is outside the acceptable limits?
If the product were extremely critical-- say, a life and death sort of thing like a pacemaker-- I would reject it if it failed even one test. And that would be good practice. You propose to retest it again and again until you get the result you want. Try explaining your rationale to the family of the the person who dies because you were trying to be "reasonable" in your testing, rather than stringent.
A higher court, with more/better educated judges
In the Norwegian system, it's possible to be acquitted by no less than two different courts before some third set of judges decides to jail you. If you believe that the third set is somehow "better" than the lower courts, then you're implicitly casting the other two sets of judges as wrong or even incompetent in those cases (perhaps because they're under-educated?) You're admitting that most of the legal decisions in your country are being made by judges who are periodically (nay, regularly) in error. That's a legal system I'd love to be subject to.
On a long LONG drive to northern california I figured out the only sensible way the matrix universe could work and still maintain total coherency.... the universe in which the robots and humans reside is a *simulation* (not another matrix, but a simulation).
Were you, by any chance, smuggling a leaky bag of Cocaine in your stomach?
It doesn't have to be "Open Source" in order to be open to public scrutiny.
Sure. Replace "open source" with "shared source" or whatever buzzword you want... as long as election officials can release it to public/expert scrutiny and compile it on a platform they can configure themselves.
The complaints echo those that came up when lever machines were introduced in the 1920s, and again when punch cards came on the scene, said Doug Lewis, an expert at The Election Center in Houston, Texas.
"We were going to find that elections were manipulated wildly and regularly. Yet there was never any proof that that happened anywhere in America," Lewis said.
Yes, but the design of those lever machines is available to election officials, and can be examined carefully prior to every election. Is Diebold willing to offer those assurances to election officians? Say, open sourcing everything and allowing officials to take it apart and reassemble it before the election?
I didn't realize that you could sue to get your hands on classified documents under the freedom of information act. Things are classified for a reason.
And what is that reason, exactly? That's what the plaintiff is asking here. Can the government continue to offer a legitimate reason for keeping decades-old documents classified? If so, they'll stay classified.
Let's face it-- even if those documents contain information about state-of-the-art (at the time) US aircraft, it's somewhat unlikely that there's still a reason to keep them under wraps. If we didn't have mechanisms like FOIA to periodically re-evaluate the need for secrecy on ancient documents, everything would stay classified out of sheer inertia, even when there was clearly no longer a reason for secrecy.
Companies can only be held accountable for leveraging a monopoly, and this case has already been heard and decided on.
I believe it was determined that Microsoft did leverage their monopoly; can they not be held liable for additional damages that resulted from these illegal actions?
What you seem to imply is that Microsoft is somehow freed from all other legal liability because they settled one case. That's like saying you can't be hit with a civil wrongful death suit in addition to being convicted of manslaughter; I don't think there's any such guarantee. The two cases would be heard separately.
I'm already paying tax and regulatory fee for my local phone number, but I still have to pay tax and regulatory fees on my long distance usage. That's how I would look at VoIP providers in this instance; as long-distance providers.
Therefore, they can be taxed, but at the much lower rate that LD providers are taxed at, not at the rate that local providers are taxed at (because you're already paying these charges.)
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, there is work to be done in the Election Supervisor's office before November comes around
On the contrary. I think everything's going pretty much as planned.
I have several patents to my name. Because of this, I know precisely how easy it is to formulate a set of relatively obvious concepts to look like patentable "method". Very few of these patents can really withstand legal scrutiny, but the cost of doing so is itself a bludgeon.
What makes this claim so disgusting, as I was attempting to point out in my post, is that Tivo has framed its objections to EchoStar's device so generally that they would apply to virtually any device that implemented standard PVR technology using commodity hardware, regardless of the specific methods used. By pointing out that Tivo has patented the "idea", I meant to imply that they are vastly overreaching what they should legally be allowed to patent-- specific, original methods.
Incidentally, I also have some experience with Tivo as a corporation, as my employer partnered with them several years ago. They are not hesitant about threatening legal action based on dubious ground, because they know that the threat of legal action is the only real weapon they have. Understandable for a small company, but certainly not something I approve of.
1) Reading and writing TV to the disk at the same time.
2) Reading and writing the same program to the disk at the same time.
3) Using a special file-system designed to allow "rewind, fast-forward and pause".
The first claim is rendered questionable by the mere fact that Tivo was able to purchase an off-the-shelf MPEG chip that encoded and decoded simultaneously. Though I can think of many uses for such a chip, at least one of those obvious uses is the simultaneous recording and playback of television. Note, I'm biased by the fact that I actually saw computers doing this in research labs long before Tivo the company existed or filed this patent.
The second is just nonsensical. So Tivo implemented a system that could record and play back at the same time, and used it to implement a digital version of a tape-loop. Not a new idea.
The third is trash. "Trick play" is a euphemism for "doing what every other MPEG-based video format does".
There are people who believe you can take a bunch of pre-existing components, bang them together for a use they were clearly designed for (recording TV), and this somehow "earns" you a patent. But it's nonsense. All Tivo did is take other people's off-the-shelf technologies and come up with a neat use for it. That's not patent-worthy, because the device itself is not terribly original.
It's not just bank records! One of the other neat tricks in this bill is that the definition of "financial institution" has been rewritten to something like "any institution that handles large amounts of money." So this could in theory apply to any institution or business with which you do business with-- supermarkets, videostores, paypal, etc. With no judicial oversight or warrants.
That's supposed to be "the off-the-shelf under $10 MPEG chip they chose to use" was designed to simultaneously record and play back. I'm sure the manufacturers of that component (IBM?) never considered using it to record and playback from fixed storage simultaneously.
Hardly a valid comparison. MPEG2 was specifically designed for the purpose of recording interlaced television; this was long before Tivo existed. When this codec was being devised, the developers anticipated that it might be used to record files to some sort of fixed digital storage-- thus, they implemented block formats that make it possible to pause and skip forward and backwards (you see this in DVDs and other media that pre-exist Tivo.) I even saw a number of hard-disk-based recorders implemented in research laboratories prior to Tivo's commoditization of same.
So the question now becomes: what is Tivo's "original" claim? The ability to record TV? No, that's what MPEG was designed for. The file system? Perhaps their implementation is original, but the concept of such a filesystem is nothing new-- it was anticipated in the MPEG2 design. The ability to record and play back a show at the same time? Well, here's a hint: The off-the-shelf to use in the original Tivo provided for simultaneous encoding and decoding. Now think about that; if the ability to record and play back simultaneously was so original, why would this sort of commodity hardware exist? It was specifically designed to do what Tivo claims is "original".
I don't dispute that the original Tivo did something that nobody else had done in the past. I'm only arguing that it was an incremental development, more of commoditizing pre-existing hardware devices and providing a neat interface. A more apt analogy would be if the Wright brothers had simply bought all the parts for their airplane kit off the shelf-- wings, aelerons, rudder, engine, all very coincidentally designed to be assembled together into an aerborne vehicle. Would we consider their flyer an original invention, just because they marketed it first?
The use of MPEG2 should have indicated this invention was obvious. MPEG2 is a video codec that was specifically designed for the purpose of recording television; it includes block formats that make rewind, fast-forward, and (obviously) pause possible. There have been many previous implementations of MPEG recorders that use disk-based playback.
In this case, Tivo simply used the MPEG protocol for one of the uses it was designed for (they even used off-the-shelf video encoding chips.) The "innovation" here appears to be the ability to read and write at the same time. I suppose we'll have to wait until this reaches court to see if that's enough of an innovation to support a patent.
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television using a) a bunch of video codecs they didn't invent, b) a bunch of commodity hardware they didn't invent, and c) the brilliant invention of rewind, fast-forward and get this... pause.
There are many original and non-obvious aspects to the Tivo design. The ability to record television, and (!!!) play it back at the same time, do not count. Give Tivo this one, within five years they'll be claiming patent infringement against anyone who records TV onto a hard-disk.
Incidentally, I remember back when Tivo obtained this patent. A bunch of Slashdot commenters-- with a "RTF(Patent)" attitude similar to yours-- made no effort to conceal their contempt for those of us who thought the patent might affect similar (but non-identical) implementations. IIRC, they made a big deal over the precise details in the claims, and how you would have to infringe upon all of those things to merit a lawsuit. Looks like things aren't quite so rosy.
I'm not sure what the difference is going to be here. If your computer has a bad A/D converter and electronics (and most do, really), then no piece of software is going to make this better. If Macs have sufficiently high quality A/D conversion for this purpose, then you should be able to use any recording software, and I believe there's plenty of it.
Question about the firewall: The "exceptions" dialog indicates that the checked programs "will be allowed to receive connections from other computers." What if I simply want to prevent a program from making outbound connections, the way I can with ZoneAlarm?
Everything you say may be true, but I imagine it will be many years (decades) before we achieve equilibrium. Somehow your argument doesn't appeal to me very much, and it probably won't make a difference for you and I.
Yes, it was part selfishness. It was also part optimism. The general story used to sell these sorts of policie is the old: "some jobs will be lost, but in the long run we'll all gain-- all you have to do is retrain for a more cutting edge area."
It was easy enough to believe this was true when manufacturing jobs were going overseas. It was a terrible thing for the peope losing their job, but we sincerely believed that new opportunities would open up for those with a forward-thinking attitude, because we were Americans and that's the natural order of the world. You'll see many Slashdot posters taking that line even today-- comparing the current loss of jobs to the industrial revolution, etc., admonishing us all not to worry, we just have to wait for all the great new even-higher-level jobs that are due to us now that we've offshored those pesky coding duties to foreigners.
Problem is, it's increasingly difficult to see where these new opportunities are going to open up. In the past we had the advantage of a) having more natural resources (coal/steel/etc), and b) being one of the most educated countries in the world. But in a global economy, natural resources don't matter, and we're fast losing our advantage in education, now that India and China are producing thousands of brilliant students (with enough highly-educated people that GE can open a pure research lab over there). Note that India and China are smart enough to adopt national policy to educate their people, while America is allowing its educational system to go to the wolves.
So when this new opportunity comes along-- be it nanotech, biotech, whatever is next-- what insures that Americans won't lose it to foreigners? Unless it's something that by nature can only be done by US workers (and what would that be??), we're screwed. So I think the reason people are panicking now has something to do with the realization that there is nowhere to go from here-- that we've finally been pushed into the ceiling of our own capabilities, and the magical "retrain and retool" approach pro-globalization folks have advocated is not going to carry us when foreign workers can do the same and cost 1/50th as much to feed and house.
In fact, because of this problem, I've determined that it may actually be cheaper to pay the $5/month or whatever a commercial bank wants. If you make more than three withdrawals in a month from a non-Credit-Union ATM, you're going to exceed that amount anyway. A larger bank will tend to have enough machines spread all over the country that the fee pays for itself.
ATM machines are certainly not free, but they are a damned sight less expensive than the human-operated branches that banks used to provide for their customers (at no charge). In fact, cost-cutting is one of the reasons banks have consistently offered when replacing branches with ATMs. What any consumer with a brain should notice is that over the past decade or two, banks have continuously reduced their operating costs thanks to ATMs, and yet the amount of money customers tend to shell out for banking services has not decreased-- it has consistently risen. ATM fees are a big part of that.
The existence of ATM fees is due to the lack of reciprocal agreements among different banks. If bank A has thousands of machines, and wishes to provide better service for its customers, it stands to reason that it would try to enter into an agreement with another large bank B, in order to guarantee that neither banks' customers have to pay fees at ATMs belonging to either bank.
Unfortunately, experience has indicated that banks don't feel any desire to do this. In the real world, it is far more profitable for large banks to collude against their own customers through inaction-- by not creating reciprocal agreements, and collecting vast amounts of additional money through fees. This pads their bottom lines, and hey, what are customers going to do about it? There are only a few banks large enough to make such collaboration practical, and they don't seem too concerned about how much customers are paying (fees continue to rise, way ahead of inflation, despite the fact that the tech is getting cheaper.)
A similar situation exists in the world of wireless communications, where international phone companies ruthlessly assess other companies' customers absurd international roaming fees, even when the caller is only a few hundred miles from his home country. The income these corporations derive from fleecing their customers is far greater than what they would make if they chose to collaborate; since only a few companies are large enough to make this sort of agreement, and those companies make too much money off of the current arrangement, customers have nowhere to go.
Not quite "whenever possible". At very least, redistricting has been historically confined to census cycles, by a sort of gentleman's agreement between the parties. The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently.
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
You might not. My wife, a Sprint customer of several years, thought her nighttime minutes still began at 7pm, only to notice a $42 charge on her Sprint bill for a 1hr call beginning at 8:50pm.
Apparently they moved "night" back to 9pm without informing her. The contract allows this kind of change, and it's one of the reasons I dislike Sprint so much right now. What makes it worse is that Sprint is now advertising "nights starting at 7pm" as though it's some luxurious new feature-- when in fact they're only moving back to a service level many customers already thought they had.
Incidentally, Sprint also charges any call that begins even one minute before "nighttime" as though the whole call took place during the day.
Absolutely, and that's the basis for much of the English legal system. We recognize that the courts are often wrong, and we choose to place our burden of protection on the individual-- in an attempt to insure that innocent people aren't wrongly convicted. It could be argued that it makes more sense to protect society-- as Norway does-- perhaps locking a few innocent people up in order to keep dangerous criminals off the street.
That's neither here nor there. My beef is not so much with your legal system, but rather with the naive and demonstrably false argument you chose to defend it. Specifically, your claim that the Norwegian appeals system can be justified by its attempt to provide a "better", "more competent" decision. Hell, you even went so far as to claim that the Norwegian system was more accurate than the English system. Therefore, am I wrong to point out that the judges in your "accurate" system often disagree with one another?
In your post above, you claim that the goal of your appeals system is to decide a case with the highest level of competence possible-- I disagree. If competence were the only reason different courts disagreed, the answer would be simple: get rid of the incompetent judges who disagreed with their more competent counterparts. In reality, the reason different courts disagree often has nothing to do with competence, it has to do with subjective decisions made by judges. There's absolutely no guarantee that a higher court will be more competent, though it sure does make us feel better to imagine that's the case.
By casting your appeals system as a search for competence (and nothing more), you exhibit an extremely naive and demonstrably false understanding of the judicial system. In many cases, your system simply allows one set of judges to impose their prejudices on any defendant in the country. The real difference between our systems is that the English system distributes part of the decision-making process, insuring that no one court has absolute power in all respects, or can ever abuse its power to imprison people.
If the product were extremely critical-- say, a life and death sort of thing like a pacemaker-- I would reject it if it failed even one test. And that would be good practice. You propose to retest it again and again until you get the result you want. Try explaining your rationale to the family of the the person who dies because you were trying to be "reasonable" in your testing, rather than stringent.
A higher court, with more/better educated judges
In the Norwegian system, it's possible to be acquitted by no less than two different courts before some third set of judges decides to jail you. If you believe that the third set is somehow "better" than the lower courts, then you're implicitly casting the other two sets of judges as wrong or even incompetent in those cases (perhaps because they're under-educated?) You're admitting that most of the legal decisions in your country are being made by judges who are periodically (nay, regularly) in error. That's a legal system I'd love to be subject to.
Were you, by any chance, smuggling a leaky bag of Cocaine in your stomach?
Sure. Replace "open source" with "shared source" or whatever buzzword you want... as long as election officials can release it to public/expert scrutiny and compile it on a platform they can configure themselves.
Yes, but the design of those lever machines is available to election officials, and can be examined carefully prior to every election. Is Diebold willing to offer those assurances to election officians? Say, open sourcing everything and allowing officials to take it apart and reassemble it before the election?
And what is that reason, exactly? That's what the plaintiff is asking here. Can the government continue to offer a legitimate reason for keeping decades-old documents classified? If so, they'll stay classified.
Let's face it-- even if those documents contain information about state-of-the-art (at the time) US aircraft, it's somewhat unlikely that there's still a reason to keep them under wraps. If we didn't have mechanisms like FOIA to periodically re-evaluate the need for secrecy on ancient documents, everything would stay classified out of sheer inertia, even when there was clearly no longer a reason for secrecy.
I believe it was determined that Microsoft did leverage their monopoly; can they not be held liable for additional damages that resulted from these illegal actions?
What you seem to imply is that Microsoft is somehow freed from all other legal liability because they settled one case. That's like saying you can't be hit with a civil wrongful death suit in addition to being convicted of manslaughter; I don't think there's any such guarantee. The two cases would be heard separately.
Therefore, they can be taxed, but at the much lower rate that LD providers are taxed at, not at the rate that local providers are taxed at (because you're already paying these charges.)
So, props to you folks-- maybe Lucas's next movie will be slightly less of a train-wreck because of you.